How long was de gaulle president of france

Considered the only leader of sufficient strength and stature to deal with the perilous situation, he was made the virtual dictator of France, with power to rule by decree for six months. A new constitution of his design was approved in a national referendum in September, and on December 21 he was elected president of the Fifth Republic. During the next decade, President de Gaulle granted independence to Algeria and attempted to restore France to its former international stature by withdrawing from the U.

On April 28, , Charles de Gaulle, at 79 years old, retired permanently. He died the following year. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! On December 21, , year-old James Naismith introduces the first game of basketball. Two teams of On December 21, , the music video for "Gangnam Style," a song by the Korean rapper Psy, becomes the first YouTube video to garner one billion views.

The video's global popularity is a case study in the power and unpredictability of viral internet content. Psy had been On December 21, , the United Arab Emirates is formed. The union of six small Gulf kingdoms—to which a seventh was soon added—created a small state with an outsized role in the global economy.

A number of kingdoms on the norther coast of the Arabian Peninsula came under It is on the collective will of the African peoples that the structure of the French Community reposes. Where, as in Algeria, a hostile will has manifested itself, it must be opposed by a counterwill, an Algerian will, which is nevertheless sympathetic to France.

And if, as in France itself, no such will seems to exist, then it must be creased and inculcated, if necessary, by artificial respiration. Several months before his return to power in , De Gaulle was visited by the journalist Jean-Raymond Tournoux. This is not a national ambition. Today there is no collective ambition. It is here that we first glimpse that gap between thought and action, between analysis and program, which has perhaps been the salient characteristic of the General's exalted experiment in romantic statesmanship.

The analysis, here, as in virtually everything he has attempted, has been surer than the prescription; the diagnosis more pertinent than the cure. Try as he might, De Gaulle has never really managed to give this national ambition a clear definition or direction.

But the tentative efforts that have been made, both after the war and, more recently, at the time of Khrushchev's visit to France, to implement this philosophy have done little to excite the imagination of the French people. The General has also been much tempted by the idea that France has an African destiny. This is, almost certainly, a more realistic notion, and the Franco-African Community is, along with the new Constitution, one of De Gaulle's few concrete realizations since his return to power.

But just what the future of this Community is likely to be is a mystery, and here, too, in the face of practical difficulties, the ideal has tended to dissolve in a mist of Gallic skepticism. Still, the General is persuaded, the country must be galvanized, the national heart stimulated, the people exhorted, even if it is not quite clear what the exhortation is for.

Though the precise geography of these heights is misty, what matters is momentum. After the war there were Frenchmen, like Jean Monnet and Robert Schumann, who thought that the one cause which could enlist general enthusiasm in France and transcend the sterile doctrinal quarrels of the past was the creation of a United States of Europe. De Gaulle refused to lead his prestige to this undertaking, not only because of his military conviction that all patriotism is essentially local and that without patriotic fervor nothing worth while can be accomplished; not only because he saw in European integration a threatened leveling of all those national, provincial, and cultural diversities which have been the source of the peculiar richness of European civilization; but also because he detected in the establishment of a European executive and parliament a threat to that national sovereignty which he had so jealously and intransigently assumed in June of , an inadmissible intrusion on his private, passionate love affair with France.

Had the General remained in power after , it is quite conceivable that he, would have done nothing to oppose the establishment of the Steel and Coal Community or, later, the European Common Market. Those who were apprehensive that he would take France out of NATO and the Common Market overlooked a cardinal tract in his political philosophy that France, or any nation, must respect its international treaties. He did not need to be told that if France were to repeat this performance in or by walking out of NATO or the Common Market, no one could ever take the word of a French government seriously again.

The new Constitution which De Gaulle pushed through in the summer of has momentarily given France a more stable form of government. Now, as in former times, France is living from day to day. The cause of this unrest is the problem of Algeria. We may well have to leave it to future historians to determine whether in the summer of it was still possible to wrench some peaceful settlement of the Algerian imbroglio with a minimum of bloodshed.

But it already seems clear that the General complicated an arduous task by the hesitations he displayed in tackling the problem. Instead of forming a government primarily designed to deal with the Algerian crisis, he composed one which seemed more tailored for business as usual.

It seemed designed to proclaim that the new regime wished not to break with the hated system but to perpetuate it. This was an open challenge to the military rebels in Algiers, and it immediately aggravated the already difficult task of overcoming local resistance and of re-establishing the authority of the Paris government on the other side of the Mediterranean. To compensate for this appointment, De Gaulle was forced to offer the key Ministry of Information to Jacques Soustelle, one of the principal plotters of the May 13 uprising, who did not hesitate to use his office to give the General's Algerian policies an extremely tendentious and at times deliberately fallacious interpretation.

This almost studied carelessness in the choice of his political associates is the General's cardinal failing as a statesman. Administrative questions and problems of execution are irksome to him.

In itself, this unconcern would not be too damaging—for it is a fact that De Gaulle has managed to enlist two able Finance Ministers to help him—were it not accompanied by such a disdain for problems of human administration.

It seems to be De Gaulle's conviction that the privilege of serving under his orders is enough to transform the most humdrum politician or unqualified bureaucrat into a loyal and effective leader of men. When Paul Delouvier, a financial expert who had no qualifications for the job, was invited to become Delegate General in Algiers and dared to suggest that he was not big enough for the post, he was promptly silenced.

In failing to put together a government primarily designed to deal energetically with the Algerian crisis when he took office in , the General no doubt feared, as he had feared in , that a period of authoritarian rule would be denounced on all sides as a form of Gaullist dictatorship. Yet it now seems clear that it would have been wiser to have taken this risk than to allow the situation to drift along aimlessly in a strange twilight mood.

Thanks to this indecision, the General allowed the enthusiasm generated on both sides of the Mediterranean in May and June of to congeal at a time when he could have demanded considerable sacrifices from his people for a more intensive prosecution of the war, as for a bolder pursuit of the peace.

So slow and ineffective was he in imposing the authority of his government over the dissidents that he allowed General Salan, who had as many enemies as friends in Algiers, to remain in charge of the Algerian military apparatus for more than six months, and when he finally succeeded in removing this devious political general, he could find no one better to replace him than an Air Force general totally lacking in prestige.

His visits to the army in the field, whom he found full of bellicose ardor and fired with a positively missionary zeal for the building of a new Algeria in which Muslims would enjoy equal rights with Europeans, inevitably awoke a nostalgic echo in a man who has always regarded the French army as the chief instrument of France's glory and the guardian of its patriotic flame. The Constitution of the Fifth Republic, which did not mention Algeria, made it clear by implication that Algeria's departments were simply a trans-Mediterranean extension of metropolitan France, a status which was confirmed when the population of Algeria was invited to take part in the September referendum and to elect some seventy deputies to the new National Assembly in Paris.

The fact that two thirds of these had to be Muslims could not mask the truth that this was integration in everything but name. The General's Algerian policy was henceforth in open contradiction with his African policy, which he had founded on the right of self-determination. Any attempt to adopt a policy other than that of integration was now bound to demand either a revision of the Constitution or, as has in fact happened, a bland disregard for the Constitution.

Naturally, these measures were interpreted by the rebel leadership in Tunis as a victory for Jacques Soustelle and the partisans of a French Algeria, and they reacted to them, first by declaring a boycott of the September 28 referendum and then by establishing a provisional government in exile, a fateful move which was bound to hamstring all subsequent attempts to reach a meeting of minds between Tunis and Fans.

Everything De Gaulle has done since then has been a prolonged endeavor to escape the implications and to reverse the tides of this policy. His refusal to clarify his own position on the Algerian question created a vacuum in the election of November, , into which rushed the vociferous champions of Algerian integration.

Since the Sphinx would not speak, they would speak for it. The result was that incredible spectacle of a raggle-taggle caravan of genuine Gaullists, die-hard chauvinists, and carpetbagging ramp followers who rode into the Assembly brandishing the tricolor of integration and noisily proclaiming their eternal love of General de Gaulle, and the no less incredible dismay evinced by the General before the sweeping success of his own supporters.

The President won by a strong majority in the general election that followed. Charles de Gaulle promised to leave power if a majority voted against the referendum. True to his word, he resigned the next day.

He was provisionally replaced by Senate President Alain Poher. He retired to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, retired from political life, and dedicated himself to writing his memoirs.

Open menu Go to homepage. Yesterday , th anniversary of the Republic Former Presidents The institutions Founding texts Principles of the Republic The symbols The flag, Marianne, the national anthem, the rooster En French English. Former Presidents of the Republic. Charles de Gaulle - April He was temporarily assigned to the independent Polish Army.

Although the Appeal of 18 June was not recorded, the Appeal of 22 June was. Talks with the FLN began. May Student and worker protests shook up French society.